What happened on Easter Island sounds like a fable, but it is a true story, although one in which many questions remain unanswered. It tells how a group of people inherited an island of great natural resources, developed a civilisation that openly destroyed this natural environment, and then reaped the whirlwind.
There are disturbing parallels between Easter Island and aspects of current global human behaviour. The story is told by Clive Ponting in A Green History of the World (Penguin 1991).
Easter Island lies in the Pacific between Chile and Tahiti. Originally formed by a volcanic eruption, the island is small, covering an area of only 64 square miles. For millions of years it remained uninhabited, but was colonised by a group of Polynesian (or South American) seafarers about 2,000 years ago.
The new arrivals found a rich island filled with great palm trees which they used to build boats and houses. They had brought plants with them which thrived in the rich volcanic earth. The people spread and prospered and the island population grew to about 8,000 people by AD 1550.
Different clans formed in several centres of population. They were all bound together by one thing in particular - the strange cult of building giant statues.
Statue building became an obsession with the Easter Islanders and ultimately precipitated their downfall. The statues were carved with great skill in a huge quarry from softer volcanic rock, and were transported up to 14 miles across the island to various ceremonial platforms.
The statues were enormous, typically 25 feet high and about 40 tons in weight. Statues up to 70 feet high have been found. They all have the same general design of a stylised angular face and long phallus shaped body. They were possibly commemorative images of important people.
How did the islanders transport the statues? This was difficult, as is clear even today on Easter Island, where many statues are seen to lie abandoned by ancient roadways where they fell and broke during transport. It seems most probable that the statues were moved on logs lubricated with palm tree oil. Island legends speak of the statues "walking" to their display sites, which suggests they were moved in an upright configuration, being steadied by teams manning ropes. However recent computer simulations show that it would have been much easier to transport horizontal statues bound to two large logs by rolling the unit along on other logs placed perpendicularly to the unit.
Over 1,000 giant statues were carved. Each clan had its own display platforms, which were arranged along the coast. The clans competed with each other to see who could build the biggest and best statues. But soon everything went terribly wrong.
The first settlers on Easter Island found a paradise, but the archaeological evidence suggests that as their civilisation developed, it gradually exhausted the once-bountiful environment. The most important natural resource was the palm trees. These were felled in order to build homes, boats, fires and, finally, rollers and levers to move the statues.
Creating the giant statues became an obsession, accelerating the felling of the trees and probably eventually ensuring their total disappearance. When the palm forests vanished the volcanic top soil eroded and washed into the sea. Crops failed and the clans turned on each other to fight for scarce resources.
The people turned against the symbols of their previous success and many statues were toppled and broken. Things went from bad to worse and there is evidence that, eventually, the warring factions resorted to cannibalism. The population declined, perhaps as low as 700, and the culture collapsed.
In time things improved a bit, but the cult of the giant statues was not revived. It seems to have been replaced by a new cult of the Birdman. This cult chose the leader of the island annually in a contest in which the contestants scaled down sheer cliffs to the sea, swam through shark-infested waters to an islet and tried to gather an egg of a nesting Sooty Tern and return it unbroken to shore. The winner was declared Birdman of the Year and was showered with privileges.
The cult of the Birdman persisted until the mid 1800s when Peruvian slave traders arrived and abducted all healthy individuals. This finally broke the people and left them leaderless. The slave traders were succeeded by the missionaries who easily converted the dispirited survivors to "Christianity".
The traditional culture quickly sank without trace in the new climate. Out went the traditional style of dress, tattooing, body paint, traditional artworks, buildings and sacred objects.
The story of Easter Island is a chilling warning we would do well to heed. Here was a people who inherited a rich island but who wantonly impoverished it in the grip of an obsession. The island is small - they could see the trees disappearing before their eyes, but yet they persisted. We now live in a global village, rich in natural resources. Yet we persist in squandering these resources. We are felling our remaining vast reservoirs of trees in the rainforests.
Satellite pictures show us how fast this destruction is proceeding, but we do little about it. We are burning off our limited supplies of fossil fuels and filling the air with warming carbon dioxide gas, which is changing world climate. We have depleted our protective ozone layer. . . I could go on but you know the litany.
No doubt the Easter Islanders prayed to their gods to make new trees grow while they persisted in chopping them down. Are we so sure we are not doing the same thing - despoiling the Earth while appealing to our god of Technology and Development to repair the damage? If we persist we will probably find that our new god is no more powerful than a giant stone statue.
(William Reville is a Senior Lecturer in Biochemistry and Director of Microscopy at UCC.)